I am an evil giraffe. But I'm trying, Nick. I'm trying REAL HARD to be the wizard.

Short version: use this image against would-be Democratic deficit busters.

Longer version: the White House is trying to have its own facts, again. At issue is their recent attempt to brag that the deficit for 2014 has been reduced to a ‘mere’ 2.8% of GDP. As Twitchy ably notes/rebutted in response, that would be great, except for two minor little problems:

The debt is still spiraling out of control; and

As the Washington Times put it, back in October: “The deficit has indeed declined, but from the $1.4 trillion peak achieved in Mr. Obama’s stimulus-fueled first year in office. He can hardly celebrate cutting in half what he first tripled.*”

The White House confirmed on Thursday that President Obama had met his uncle, Onyango Obama, who was granted legal residency to the country this week — reversing a previous statement.

The White House had previously toldThe Boston Globe that the president had never met his uncle, after Onyango — referred to as Omar — was arrested in 2011 for drunk driving.

But White House press secretary Jay Carney revised that statement on Thursday, saying the press office had not actually asked the president about his relationship with his uncle before talking to the Globe in 2011.

Turns out that the reported 40K Obamacare signup “figures are derived from reports that the government sends to each participating insurer early every evening, letting them know which customers have signed up that day.” Which means that Sebelius knew what those numbers were, all along. She and her boss. (more…)

I spent perhaps a bit too much time this morning trying to put the spreadsheet below into graphical form:

Pollster

Time

R

D

R +/-

NPR

Oct 3/4

43

43

0

NPR

Sept 4/4

45

48

-3

Politico

Oct 4/4

46

45

1

Politico

Oct 3/4

46

46

0

Politico

Oct 2/4

44

46

-2

Politico

Oct 1/4

45

46

-1

Politico

Sept 4/4

44

46

-2

Politico

Sept 3/4

45

47

-2

Rasmussen

Oct 4/4

46

43

3

Rasmussen

Oct 3/4

44

43

1

Rasmussen

Oct 2/4

42

43

-1

Rasmussen

Oct 1/4

43

44

-1

Rasmussen

Sept 4/4

45

41

4

Rasmussen

Sept 3/4

44

43

1

Rasmussen

Sept 2/4

44

43

1

Rasmussen

Sept 1/4

42

44

-2

It shows the current pollsters checking the Generic Congressional Ballot, as per RCP. Most of the labels are self-explanatory: “R +/-” represents the amount by which Republicans are ahead/behind on any given poll. RCP’s current average is R+1.3, which represents a strong shift towards the Republicans in the last month among all three pollsters: 5 points for Rasmussen, 4 points for Politico, and 3 for NPR (although ‘shift’ is possibly the wrong word for the last one, given that there’s only been two polls).

The following is a fairly vivid example of why people want to see crosstabs whenever possible when it comes to polls:

A

R

L

Romney

37

40

46

Obama

52

50

47

Republican

37

38

44

Democrat

50

49

48

The above is from a just-released AP-GfK poll; as you can see, it shows Obama up by one (47-46) over Romney in a poll of likely voters. Bad news for Obama, as the intent was that he was supposed to be opening up a lead at this point; not so great news for Romney either, since the D+4 sample is a lot more likely to be reflective of the actual voting electorate in November than the D+7 or higher nonsense that we’ve been seeing lately. But that’s another post. (more…)

On Wednesday, at a speech in Charlottesville, VA, President Obama made this statement:

And they were asked about it and they said — one of their campaign people said, we won’t have the fact-checkers dictate our campaign. (Laughter.) We will not let the truth get in the way. (Laughter.)

This is a reference to comments made Tuesday by Romney pollster Neil Newhouse to Buzzfeed regarding Obama’s gutting of welfare reform; more specifically, the perhaps vehement media reactions to one ad cut by Romney attacking said gutting. Newhouse stated:

“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have “jumped the shark,” he added after the panel.

…by The New Republic (!) is all very well, but it lacks one key phrase: “voting enthusiasm.” Which makes a certain amount of sense: dwelling on that topic might force one to come perilously close to turning a ‘the election is tied’ narrative into an ‘actually, Obama is more or less losing right now’ one. And we can’t have that.

Here’s the real problem with the polling, honestly: we don’t know what the electorate is going to look like in November. We just know that basing it on ’08’s numbers is a mistake… but nobody knows how much of a mistake it’ll end up being. And while it’s easy for me to say “Well, they should just eyeball it and pick voting percentages that look right,” that’s because I’m not a professional pollster…

The Daily Caller reported on a poll today that gave a rather remarkable result: it showed Barack Obama ahead of Mitt Romney 49 to 37… in Cook County, Illinois: which of course includes the City of Chicago. Being under 50% in what can be considered the ultimate Democratic stronghold is not good news for the President. In 2008 Cook County went for Obama over McCain 67/32; in 2010 it went for Quinn over Brady 54/40… which helped make the difference from Obama’s blowout 62/37 win statewide in 2008, and Quinn’s squeaker 47/46 win in 2010. Put another way: if this poll is accurate, Obama’s got trouble in Illinois.

Since this report has been making the rounds of the Internet, I thought that I’d look into it a bit. It turns out the poll comes from McKeon & Associates, which has been polling in Illinois since at least the 1980s. A quick call to Michael McKeon got me access to the poll itself, which I’ll be talking about after the fold.

The Story So Far: two days ago, the Obama administration – using the fig-leaf/cutout of Super PAC Priorities USA – accused Mitt Romney of being a murderer because a company that Romney used to own closed down a steel mill (several years after Romney left that company) and that meant that the wife of the husband who lost his job at that steel mill (one Joe Soptic) didn’t have any insurance after the wife left her job several years after the layoff and several years after all of that the wife was diagnosed with cancer and then died. As Erick notes in the link above: if that’s an acceptable logic chain that legitimately leads one to a charge of murder, then (to give just one example) this administration murdered US Border Agent Brian Terry and Eric Holder needs to give himself up right now.

But wait! It gets even more convoluted. You see, the Media is balking – absolutely balking– at taking this line of attack seriously, and the Obama administration has already done its best to distance itself from the Priorities USA ad, to the point where Obama for America (OfA) spokesman Stephanie Cutter denied that they had any knowledge of Soptic’s story.

So… who’s that voice at the end of this conference call, Stephanie? Your evil twin?

(Originally noticed by @NathanWurtzel) Key: M is McCain, O is Obama. The above compares the difference between the ratio of McCain/Obama voters in Quinnipac’s latest poll (which had Obama by six in Ohio and Florida, and by eleven in Pennsylvania) by the actual ratio of McCain/Obama voters from 2008. As you can see… yes, Quinnipac at least found Obama voters. But it wasn’t finding McCain voters in Florida and Ohio; and while I take Sean Trende’s point that people tend to ‘forget’ that they voted for the loser I have to note that they apparently didn’t forget in Pennsylvania. I would also suggest that the fact that Ohio and Pennsylvania flipped its state government (including governorships) to the GOP in 2010, while Florida increased its Republican majorities, suggests that the electorate in none of those states has gotten more Democratic in the last four years. (more…)